AHO WORKS STUDIES 2011-2012
Institute of Form, Theory and History
What’s in a name?
cent disciplines such as art history, intellectual
history, philosophy and comparative literature.
In the humanities a division of the two would
be considered both artificial and troublesome:
How is it really possible to envisage history
without theory, and what is (architectural)
theory if not an integral part of (architectural)
history? Also the vivid doxa of
history
consid-
ered as a retrospective activity (this is an ac-
tual quote from a dear colleague and superb
designer) will remain slightly enigmatic for
non-architects among architects. “All history is
contemporary history,” Benedetto Croce noted
in his 1915
Teoria e storia della storiografia
. In
a time when transformation, recycling, repro-
gramming and alteration is one of the burning
issues of contemporary architecture, the idea
that history is something else and beyond ar-
chitecture appears even more enigmatic.
So what, then, is in the name Institute of
Form, Theory, and History? The most depress-
ing answer would be that the three words in
concert, and especially if you are a student,
might read as “This is not Architecture.” The
fact is, of course, that everything conducted
by the faculty at the Institute of Form, Theory
and History – in teaching as well as in research,
in the studios and in the seminar rooms – is
architecture. The full teaching portfolio draws
on architecture, produces architecture, crit-
icises and interprets architecture, theorises
architecture, historicises architecture, includ-
ing of course, contemporary architecture.
When we run studios on 19
th
century struc-
tures based on archival research and historio-
graphical criticism, on alteration as a critical
device for the transformation of historical or
post-war buildings; when we have students
design an orphanage in Venice in a political
context of displacement and migration, to deal
with the future of the Norwegian countryside
within a global frame, or design a kunsthalle
for contemporary art in the historical centre in
Rome; when we offer seminars on the Gesamt-
kunstwerk, Piranesi, engravings, and architec-
tural phantasies, tectonic traditions (including
building), Norwegian architecture, on fiction in
architectural discourse and production, archi-
tecture collections, exhibitions, and models;
design theory, book production and architecture
photography, on the expanded monument and
contemporary theories on conservation, etc.,
no doubt that all of this is architecture. In an
Institute where all teaching is research-based
and most courses are embedded in ongoing
research projects, itmight however be a slightly
different kind of architecture that occurs, than
the traditional architectural practice, mono-
polised as a self-explanatory A=A.
